This historical study will review eighty years of sexual and family violence in the Boston metropolitan area. Eight public and private agency case records will be used for the study. Random samples totalling 1880 cases will be selected form every tenth year beginning in 1880 and from four selected years of stress (1893-94, 1917, 1933, 1944). These will be analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Variables such as family size and structure, occupation, migration, marital history, neighborhood will be coded and analyzed. The study views rape, incest, child-abuse, and wife-beating together. Although they are different, they are all related to changes in social norms of sexual and generational relations. The study will answer the questions: Have patterns of violence changed, and how? Have the circumstanes provoking violence changed, and how? Have periods of acute economic or social stress accelerated or changed violence? Have sharp changes in family structure affected violence? Did the size and closeness of kinship networks affect violence? Did change in paternal, maternal or husbandly dominance affect violence? Has there been a constant pattern of violence recurring in succeeding generations? How has the social construction of violence changed?